Colours
by Muffytaj
Summary: Sakura and Naruto don't belong in Sound, and Sasuke will not have them there.


**Colours**

There are kids of all ages in the Sound village, each and every one of them hand-picked for their mental instability. And each of them, in their own way, tied to Orochimaru. Sasuke, for the most part, ignores them. The few that are more powerful than him are usually tied up in cages and experimented on, and he has never bothered himself with weaklings.

Well, almost never.

There's a girl with light red hair (too close to pink without actually being pink, he tests out a new jutsu that burns up your skin on her, takes away the not-pink with bright red and black) and a boy with sandy brown hair, the kind of brown that pretends to be blonde, but never quite makes it. Sasuke cracks his head open, and watches the blood stain his hair a more appropriate colour.

Sakura and Naruto do not belong in this village of despair and madness, and he will not have them here.

oOo

The not-pink girl has struck up a friendship with the not-blonde boy. Sasuke watches from the corner of his eye as the boy heals the girl, and she teaches him how to weave the air into knives.

They don't even the decency to get their roles right.

They bond over their hatred for him, quietly expressed of course, because Orochimaru loves his new toy very much, and they love (hate, fear, follow, obsess over, belong to) Orochimaru enough to feel that they should love Sasuke by proxy.

Sometimes he catches them looking at him whilst he's practicing, and he lashes out at them with fire, ignoring Kabuto's too-knowing smirk. He hates being watched, hates the feeling that they are looking for a weakness in his defense, hates the feeling that this is all so very familiar, and that if he just turns to them and half-smiles, or even just glances at them, that they will laugh and run over to his side and bother him with stupid little things and that lovely warm feeling will rush over him, that feeling that speaks of the forbidden word 'family'.

But he knows that even if he smiles a full smile at them, they will not come running, and they will not be the colours he want-needs-yearns for.

So when the not-pink girl picks up the not-blonde boy, and together they flee from him, he grinds his teeth, and goes back to his training with unnecessary vigor.

oOo

He stays in the cave mostly, nowadays. He has grown tired of feeling sunlight on his skin, the taste of rain coming, and flowers twirling through the air. Besides, now he has Orochimaru teaching his even more dangerous techniques, and for security reasons underground is best.

So it comes as a nasty shock when he is assigned not-pink and not-blonde for a small recon mission.

"I want to test out your new attacks in a real-life situation." Orochimaru says, and even though he has a pleasingly subservient tone to his voice, Sasuke can't shake the feeling that he's laughing at him. "And these two specialize in sneak attacks."

Sasuke says nothing, for even a single word would reveal too much, he simply nods his head and prepares himself.

They're having sex. He knows this as soon as he sees how they convey silent, utterly professional, messages to each other. They're not just having sex, they're _fucking_, he decides when he sees how not-blonde reacts when Sasuke gets too close to not-pink. Rough, head-banging, back-scraping sex that leaves them both dry and panting and more tired than any training ever will, he thinks, as he watches not-pink hand not-blonde his dinner.

He brought them together, he snarls in his head, staring at the huge scar on the back of not-blonde's head (why does he insist on taking the lead? Sasuke should lead! But then not-blonde and not-pink would probably fall behind and wrap themselves up in each other, better for the mission that he separate them with himself) a huge scar that not-blonde was too weak to heal completely from.

Not-pink still has burn marks across her upper body and face. She's hideous, with her tufts of not-pink hair, and her disgustingly wrong green eyes.

They're wearing the Sound uniform, and he wants nothing more than to burn them to ashes. He brought them together, and still they ignore him.

Not ignore, fear. Not-pink keeps touching her burns nervously when she thinks he isn't watching, and not-blonde keeps fingering his kunai pouch.

They dare not attack him, but oh how they want to. They want him dead, Sasuke knows, but fear Orochimaru's wrath if they should even raise a hand against him.

For some reason, that thought only further enrages him. The cowards! If they want him dead they should defy authority, kill him, and damn the consequences! They should work together, and kill him, and fuck on his grave and laugh and in the minute he spends trying to pull the colours apart, trying to remember that pink isn't red and blonde isn't brown, he hits his head on a low-hanging branch, and falls to the ground.

Not-pink and not-blonde stop, and look down at him from their righteous height.

"Do you require assistance?" Not-pink asked in as bored a tone as she dares, and he glares up at her.

"You're not her." He growls, and the puzzled look she swaps with not-blonde only makes him even angrier. "Get out of here." He snarls at them. "Go. Get out of this mission. Get out of this country. If I ever seen you near Sound again, I'll kill you both with my bare hands."

They stare at him for a second in blank astonishment, before he flings a round of kunai at them.

"Get lost! I never want to see your faces" hair, mouths, voices, touches "again! I'll tell Orochimaru that you died on your mission! Just go!" He's aiming to kill them now, and they flee.

He watches them blur into the distance, not-pink and not-blonde running side-by-side until they're out of sight.

And then, only then, he rams his hands against his ears, and screams. He screams out all his hate, his frustration, his dead dreams and destroyed chances. He screams until his throat is raw, screams until he feels dizzy from oxygen deprivation, screams until spots appear in his vision. He screams until he can scream no more, and he's on his knees in a strange forest, panting for air. Then, whilst the echoes of his despair are still bouncing back to him, he picks himself up, and goes on to finish his mission.

This is his path, and he will follow it to the end.


End file.
